Will West Coast Jazz Get Some Respect?
8 comments
·December 6, 2025omosubi
mfro
I think jazz taste has diversified a lot in the last decade and we aren’t seeing a canon outside of cliques. I know myself and other younger folks listen to the artists you listed, I know several who grew up playing in a marching band and enjoy big band, myself I listen to nearly anything.
jancsika
> his soloing was a little underwhelming
I mean, it is true that a lot of his solos get busier and bangier until he's hammering out polyrhythms at the end. I just take it as part of the ride when listening to Brubeck.
But I really don't want to listen to other jazz artists emulate that, especially knowing how little chance there is that they'll have the same creativity and sense of rhythm that Brubeck had. (Edit: based on the experience of hearing the banging without the creativity/rhythm-- it's not fun.)
iainmerrick
Glad to see Vince Guaraldi prominently mentioned here. Like the author, I got into Guaraldi via the Peanuts music, then found I loved the rest of his stuff as well.
I think Guaraldi is almost like a jazz version of Erik Satie, who’s been discussed here a few times. His music seems very simple, almost simplistic, but his taste and feel are superb. It’s just really good and easy to listen to, which unfortunately means it gets dismissed as “easy listening”.
jpster
The idea that Chet Baker and some of the others named are not “serious jazz” is too ludicrous to take.
BewareTheYiga
When I think of west coast jazz, I think of Tom Scott and I was surprised to not see him in this article.
onraglanroad
Betteridge's law of headlines.
alephnerd
Do ya like jazz? [0]
I grew up playing a lot of jazz in the late 2000s and there was always a strict canon - big band was seen as kind of cutesy and not worth putting much effort into while the Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Davis, Hancock, Shorter and a few others were the "real" musicians. But the internet was in its infancy at the time and YouTube/spotify started showing things that I had never heard of like a bunch of Japanese jazz musicians, so I always wonder what musicians coming up today see as "the canon". Is it still mostly the names I mentioned or does it include a lot more?
On a separate note, I always saw Chet baker and Gerry mulligan as "real" musicians but was taught early on that Brubeck was "staid" and boring. After judging it myself I guess you could say his soloing was a little underwhelming but he was incredibly creative in a way that a lot of the "serious" musicians weren't. Jazz people can be such losers sometimes